Digital assets have moved well beyond the experimental phase. What once felt like a parallel financial system one which was considered interesting, but best approached with caution, is now converging with the core of global finance.
Only a few years ago, cryptocurrencies and tokenised assets were the simply considered for outliers and risk-takers.
Today they are becoming part of the financial mainstream fabric, making money programmable, borderless, and faster to move.
Stablecoins sit at the centre of this shift. Designed to hold a steady value by pegging to fiat currencies (and sometimes stable commodities), they began as a niche tool for crypto trading. Now, they are evolving into the internet’s “wire service”— a default settlement layer that operates continuously.
The numbers underline the momentum: in 2024, stablecoin settlement reached $18tn, surpassing Visa’s $15.7tn.
With supply topping $300bn, stablecoins are increasingly positioned to become the always-on rail for 24/7 B2B liquidity.
As stablecoins scale, they are also reshaping expectations around capital efficiency. A growing global consensus is emerging: holding non-yielding digital cash is considered inefficient. Stablecoins held idle are effectively dead capital. That reality is accelerating demand for tokenised treasuries — on-chain cash equivalents that pair the safety of US Treasury bills with the speed and composability of crypto infrastructure.
Still early, the market exceeded $8.5bn last year, and tokens yielding 4–5 per cent could increasingly replace zero per cent stablecoins as the standard form of collateral.
Tokenisation is changing the game
Tokenisation is also starting to redraw the boundaries of private markets. Private credit has historically traded off transparency and liquidity for access and returns. Tokenisation changes that equation by making historically opaque loans more tradable and easier to price. Even a small shift would be meaningful: tokenising only 1 per cent of private credit would create a $17 bn on-chain market.
For investors, the hunt for yield does not stop at cash and credit. Staking—once viewed as a retail gamble — is maturing into something closer to an “internet bond.” Through staking-as-a-service, institutional flows are gravitating toward regulated liquid staking tokens (LSTs). As the market professionalises, staking yield is becoming less of an optional add-on and more of a standardised benchmark return that digital asset portfolios are expected to earn.
This evolution does not spell the end of traditional banks, but it does demand adaptation, and it is arriving in hybrid form. Rather than competing with public blockchains, banks are increasingly bridging to them. The emerging model blends traditional balance sheets and risk controls with token-based, programmable infrastructure that can operate across public and hybrid networks.
Initiatives such as the BIS Project Agorá signal this direction: regulated institutions securing core financial plumbing while interoperating with public networks to extend efficiency and reach at scale.
Digital asset exposures
Meanwhile, regulation and capital rules are reshaping another critical layer: custody. Basel III’s capital treatment is raising the cost of holding digital asset exposures inside banks, which is likely to trigger consolidation. The result could be a market dominated by a handful of “super custodians” controlling the majority of institutional assets.
On the infrastructure side, enterprises are also leaving an earlier phase behind. Many are moving away from isolated private blockchains toward application-specific “Layer 3” networks—app-chain architectures that combine the security and interoperability of public networks with tailored compliance, performance, and control.
In parallel, much of this new infrastructure will be embedded behind familiar user experiences, creating an “invisible back end”: fintechs gain the efficiency of on-chain rails while end users are shielded from operational complexity.
One class of user, however, needs no shielding at all: autonomous AI agents. As agentic AI scales, a new transaction environment emerges—machine-to-machine commerce where programmable money is not a feature, but the foundation.
In that world, always-on settlement, embedded compliance, and native programmability become prerequisites rather than differentiators.
At the same time, the business model of exchanges is changing. Digital asset platforms are beginning to resemble financial super-apps—bundling payments, lending, and yield to become full-stack providers.
For crypto-native customers, these platforms may become the primary financial relationship, diversifying revenue far beyond simple trading fees.
Taken together, these shifts point to a future where digital assets are embedded, institutional, and increasingly unavoidable. For business leaders, the real question is no longer whether digital assets matter but how quickly their organisations can adapt, and where in the emerging stack they should compete.
The writer is a principal at Arthur D. Little, Middle East.
